Jonathan Adler Extends its ‘Fantasy Factory’ Design Environment to Business

Jonathan Adler, has been the authority on Modern American glamour since 1993. Headquartered in New York City’s Soho neighborhood, the office is affectionately referred to as “Fantasy Factory,” a cheeky nod to Warhol’s Factory.

Inside the vibrant and colorful office, Adler and his team design everything from pottery and furniture to textiles, lighting and more. With plenty of dogs running around, the “Fantasy Factory” is designed to bring ideas to life through collaboration, irreverence and creativity.

“If you knock the work out of the park, there’s tremendous opportunity to have a great time and laugh with cool people and do really creative and fun things,” said Chief Technology Officer Damen Seminero, who first joined Jonathan Adler as a consultant over a decade ago. “It’s just an amazing place to work.”

Now, Jonathan Adler is extending that concept to how he runs the business of the same name. Since deploying NetSuite OneWorld in 2012 Jonathan Adler has gained “insane flexibility” to innovate, optimize and grow in ways not possible before, according to Seminero. Much like how high-end home furnishings are designed, ideas for business optimization are brought to life to improve cost-efficiency, time to market and strategic decision-making.

“NetSuite is our central nervous system and the single data source for our financials, inventory and customers,” Seminero said. “I can’t say enough about the flexibility NetSuite gives us to do virtually anything. I’ve never encountered a situation where I had to say, ‘No, we can’t do that.’”

Flexibility to Innovate and Grow

Previously, Jonathan Adler was throttled by siloed systems. On top of problems with poor visibility and efficiency, the company couldn’t upgrade to newer versions of its software without a massive and costly ordeal.

With NetSuite, Adler has a unified foundation for accounting, inventory management andorder processing, key elements in customer-centricretail operationsand B2B distribution. NetSuite feeds nightly catalog updates to Jonathan Adler’s ecommerce site, while the Bronto Marketing Platform triggers and delivers timely, personalized communications to customers and fans. With NetSuite OneWorld, Jonathan Adler can also set up new stores within hours, unlike the previous scenario that required weeks of provisioning on-premise software and systems.

Straightforward customizations in NetSuite, an open API and prebuilt connectors to third-party applications have made it easy for the company to engineer new efficiencies and visibility across the business, Seminero said.

“The ability to integrate and interface with NetSuite is just limitless,” Seminero said. “It’s allowed us to grow and add new locations without ever pausing. We hire people with experience on other systems and always hear, ‘NetSuite is simply amazing — we could never do this at our old company.’”

One example: Jonathan Adler wanted to add a new virtual inventory location with its third-party warehousing and distribution partner. The cost would have been over $200,000. But with NetSuite, Jonathan Adler found it could simply add a new virtual inventory location and hook it into existing data exchange processes with the partner, at no cost.

NetSuite’s flexibility has also helped fuel Jonathan Adler’s rapid growth. The company increased its number of company-run retail stores from 18 to 26 since going live on NetSuite, including two in the U.K. Wholesale retail partners have also grown from 500 to more than 1,000 across 30 countries, including such top names as Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s, Harrod’s and Saks Fifth Avenue.

Meanwhile, SKU volume has soared from 12,000 to 33,000, and NetSuite OneWorld gives Jonathan Alder seamless global financial consolidation across its U.S. and U.K. subsidiaries, and ability to transact in the British pound and other currencies.

Jonathan Adler has come a long way since the founder’s first sale of hand-crafted pottery to Barneys department store in 1993. But as growth and complexity increased, Jonathan Adler needed an agile, scalable and future-proof platform to continue its upward trajectory.

“NetSuite has made us smarter, faster and more capable,” Seminero said. “We’ve gotten out of NetSuite everything that was promised to us and everything we wanted, which was a lot. I’ve never seen a system that can do what NetSuite can do.”